Emma Donoghue*

Biography:

Emma Donoghue’s writing never fails to surprise, ranging between contem­porary and historical novels, short stories, plays, literary history and biography. Unlike many other writers, she adroitly avoids being trammelled into any particular pathway.

Emma’s new and forth­coming projects include her second volume of historical short stories, ASTRAY, published in Autumn 2012. Her play, THE TALK OF THE TOWN, about the Irish-American writer Maeve Brennan (1917−1993), has its premiere on 1 October 2012 at the Dublin Theatre Festival.

THE SEALED LETTER, based on a famous Victorian divorce case, is Emma’s latest work of historical fiction, published in the UK and Ireland in October 2011 by Picador. (It has already been published by Harper­Collins in Canada, Harcourt in the US, and Scribe in Australia/New Zealand.) THE SEALED LETTER was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2012. Then novel was longlisted for the Giller Prize, Canada’s foremost prize for literary fiction, in 2008. The novel was also joint winner of the 2009 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction.

ROOM, Emma’s most recent contem­porary novel, was published in August/September 2010 (click here for more information). One of the most eagerly anticipated books of the year, trans­lation rights in ROOM have been sold in thirty-four languages.

ROOM was short­listed for the 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction. It won the award for WH Smiths Paperback of the Year at the Galaxy National Book Awards 2011 and is longlisted for the 2012 Inter­na­tional IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. ROOM was also a finalist in the Common­wealth Writers’ Prize 2011. The novel won Canada’s Rogers Writers’ Trust Prize and was a finalist for the 2010 Governor General’s Award for English-Language Fiction. ROOM was also named as Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year at the 2010 Irish Book Awards. Following ROOM’s publication, Emma was nominated as Inter­na­tional Writer of the Year Award at the 2010 Galaxy National Book Awards, and Writer of the Year at the 2010 Stonewall Awards.

Originally from Ireland, Emma now lives in Canada with her partner and their two small children.

‘Donoghue is one of those rare writers who seems to be able to work on any register, any tone, any atmosphere, and make it her own.’ – THE OBSERVER

A stunning collection of new Irish short stories from a fascinating variety of writers, both new and estab­lished, featuring (among many others) William Trevor and Roddy Doyle, Rebecca Miller and Richard Ford, Emma Donoghue and Colm Tóibín.

More Books By This Author:

Drawn from the details of the Codrington Affair, a scandalous divorce case that gripped Britain in 1864, THE SEALED LETTER is both a gripping courtroom thriller and a domestic exposé of friendship, betrayal, love, and infidelity.

In May 2010, Knopf US published Emma Donoghue’s discoveries about the recurring patterns of story-telling and same-sex desire in the literature of the past 800 years, based on decades of original research.

A delightful, old-fashioned love story with a uniquely twenty-first-century twist, LANDING is a romantic comedy that explores the pleasures and sorrows of long-distance relationships — the kind millions of us now maintain mostly by plane, phone, and internet.

LIFE MASK concerns a love triangle in 1790s London, among the elite who moved through the overlapping worlds of art, politics, sport and theatre. It tells the tangled, true story of three people living in the harsh glare of publicity.

Inspired by a murder that took place in the Welsh Borders in 1763, SLAMMERKIN (meaning a loose dress, and a loose woman) is Emma Donoghue’s first historical novel, a gripping study of a teenage prostitute obsessed with clothes.

Emma Donoghue’s literary biography of two eccentric Victorian spinsters, Katherine Bradley (1846−1914) and her niece Edith Cooper (1862−1913), poets and lovers, who wrote together under the name of Michael Field.

Emma Donoghue’s story VANITAS forms part of LIKE A CHARM, in which Karin Slaughter brings together some of the best crime writers around the world to create a best-selling collection of thrilling short stories of murder, betrayal and intrigue.

Emma Donoghue is one of the contributors to this almost-all-girl reprise of the collab­orative fiction Finbar’s Hotel, in which Dermot Bolger skillfully weaves together eight chapters, each contributed by a different, unattributed Irish writer, into a light, coherent, and highly readable novel about a culture in flux.